I’m still here in the hospital with just my iPhone for passing the time. It has my books, my periodicals, my daily news, my online archives, and at least some of my photos. Oh, and it’s a phone, too!

So I’ve had some time to fool around with restoring old photos, some dating back more than 70 years.

There’s an example. The original, probably an early 1948, and the restored version done yesterday. The photo shows me as an infant with my older sister, Bonnie.

Normally, I would open the original old photo in Adobe, Lightroom or Photoshop on my laptop, and then make various tweaks to eliminate the visual age and fading of the photo. And I might come close to the results shown here after a tedious series of adjustments.

Instead, I copied the original 1948 version to ChatGPT, and then gave a simple series of verbal instructions.

I don’t have the exact sequence, but something like this.

“ restore vintage black-and-white photo. I just contrast and exposure. Slightly sharpen.”

This returned a very good, nearly finalized version of the restored photo. Then I directed it to straighten and crop to include only the photo, and then add a narrow white border around the photo.

At this point, photo purists would probably say I have destroyed the photo’s authenticity.

Perhaps, but how different is this from routine manual photo restoration?

I could, of course, have gone farther to add elements that aren’t actually there. Anything becomes possible when you go down this path, all via voice or written commands.

“Show the girl holding a kitten in her lap.”

Voila!

Spooky stuff!